Another Hesse

Another Hesse
Author(s): Anne M. Wagner

Source: October, Vol. 69 (Summer, 1994), pp. 49-84
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778989
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Another Hesse*
ANNE M. WAGNER
Three "Portraits" of Eva Hesse
Mel Bochner, Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966:
wrap up. secrete. cloak. bury. obscure. vanish. ensconce. disguise. concea
camouflage. confine. limit. entomb. ensack. bag. conceal. hide.
hedge-in. circumcincture. skin. crust. encirclement. cincture. ringed.
casing. veneer. shell. hull. shell. cover up. facing. blanket.
tape. mummify. coat. chinch. tie-up. bind. interlock.
splice. gird. girt. belt. band. strap. lace. wire. cable. chain.
string. cord. rope. lace. tie. bind. tie. truss. lash. leash.
enwrap. coil. twine. intertwine. bundle-up.
shroud. bandage. sheath. swaddle.
envelope. surround. swathe.
enwrap. cover, wrap.
wrap.
Hesse in Kettwig-am-Ruhr, 1965:
The guests and the works of art are a bit of a blur, as befits the scene of an
opening, but Eva Hesse stands out in sharp focus. Her hair is a sleek beehive, and
her cigarette freshly lit. Her tulips have only just begun to droop, but those that
have fallen have done so en masse. They yearn toward the string bag that hangs
ladylike from her arm. For now a purse, before long it will become a sculpture.
A photograph of the table in Hesse's studio, 1968:
The table top is gridded as if to anchor the objects upon it: an ashtray from
* This essay has been excerpted from a longer study of Hesse's art, career, and reception. Also
titled "Another Hesse," it is a chapter in my book Three Artists (Three Women): Hesse, Krasner and O'Keeffe,
forthcoming in 1995.
OCTOBER 69, Summer 1994, pp. 49-84. ? 1994 Anne M. Wagner.
Mel Bochner. Portrait of Eva Hesse.
Eva Hesse at the opening of her exhibi-

tion in Kettwig-am-Ruhr May 1965.
(Photographer unknown.)
H. Landshoff [?]. The table in Hesse's

Bowery studio. 1968.
Another Hesse 51
"Persia," a kaleid
matching cup, eac
secured with a pa
Breer, and two s
is a bristle of cle
a bowl with wrap
partmentalized p
trove-nails and w
Lucite box, all ord
is the work of So
material that H
wrapped and sk
between the grid
each one chosen a
thing to art. The
periodic table-an
impersonal inclus
Carl Andre to Ev
Form" are nearby
them, even closer
Nineteen-as it wa
exhibition. Meanw
subject, the sculp
real works next t
Village Voice. Bot
Materiality of Ma
obscured by a vom
Two Self
Hesse was no long

the two reproduc
nothing directly
nience involved in
inception. If thes
artist's self was at
matter or effect
own image while
any less intense o
pictures to sugge
almost uniformly
purposefulness, c
intensify their so
52 OCTOBER
close to the e
bodies made u
or nose or m
another are an
ical purpose:
intellect-in
angles out as
third of the
as replace it
orange and y
least because
through the g
Twenty year
that have been held in the United States.1 The first, "Eva Hesse: A Memorial
Exhibition," was mounted in 1972 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. It left
New York on a tour of four American cities, closing in Berkeley only in early 1974.
The 1992 show, by contrast, began in New Haven and ended in Washington, D.C.,
without stopping in New York or anywhere else on the way. This limited itinerary
cannot be explained solely by the fragility of Hesse's sculpture, even though it
has begun to disintegrate over the years-or at least that explanation seems
insufficient once it is noted that a number of the same pieces presented in New
Haven and Washington turned up in Europe in 1993, part of a third retrospective
making stops in Paris and Valencia. Nor does the close proximity of East Coast
cities to each other offer enough of a reason. New York's disinterest seems instead
like business as usual: if "political correctness" is really so good at policing discrim-
ination, why are there still so few shows of art by women, and why are the New
York museums still so impervious to them? These questions linger, though their
origin can be dated more or less precisely to the moment of the first Hesse show.
Yet plenty else has changed in politics and culture (and cultural politics)
since 1972, enough that it is surprising to see the similarity of the terms in which
the organizers of each show conclude their prefatory acknowledgments. Here is
Linda Shearer, then a Research Fellow at the Guggenheim, writing in the earlier
1. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, "Eva Hesse: A Memorial Exhibition," 1972. The
show was organized by Linda Shearer, with catalogue essays by Shearer and Robert Pincus-Witten, and
traveled to the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Pasadena
Art Museum; and University Art Museum, Berkeley. The stop originally planned at the Contemporary
Art Museum, Houston, and listed on the catalogue's title page, was canceled and replaced by the visit
to Berkeley. The second retrospective is documented by Eva Hesse: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale
University Art Gallery, 1992). Organized by Helen A. Cooper with essays by Maurice Berger, Anna C.
Chave, Maria Kreutzer, Linda Norden, and Robert Storr. The show traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Another Hesse 53
Untitled. 1960.
Untitled. 1960.
54 OCTOBER
catalogue: "I
feel I know
will, I hope,
ments of He
put togethe
privilege. My
that this cat
art." What s
her subject
undertake an
expresses, in
desire that h
less intact.
The wish to know Hesse is profoundly nostalgic: it voices the desire for a
return to the past to recover the Hesse who disappeared there, the woman who in
1970 died of a brain tumor at the age of thirty-four. She is the only Hesse we have,
after all: she is the person preserved in a finite number of photographs and on a
few feet of film; she is the author of a finite body of work and words. When we
import her into our present she appears there unchanged; she does not emerge,
like some returnee from Shangri-La, only to age instantly and assume the guise of
the woman she would have become had she lived. Hesse at fifty-seven, I feel certain,
would have been a considerably less attractive cultural commodity (though no less
an interesting artist, I wager) than the Hesse fate has provided. It is her timely
death that has meant that she has survived to play a special cultural role: forever
under thirty-five, she answers a hunger for youthful, tragic death. She is the "dead
girl," the beautiful corpse who counts for so much in so many cultural narratives.
("What had such works, I wondered, to do with this tragic doomed girl who stood
before me calmly pronouncing her own death sentence?")2
Much of the writing about the artist cannot resist taking advantage of the
free mileage it gets from Hesse's early death. When it is harnessed to her troubled
life, so called, an irresistible package results. "Heartache Amid Abstraction,"
"Fragile Artist's Agonized Life," "A Portrait of the Artist: Tortured and Talented,"
"The James Dean of Art," "Eva Hesse: A 'Girl Being a Sculpture,"' "Growing Up
Absurd"-this brief digest of titles culled from both ends of the Hesse literature,
the popular and the scholarly, is enough to suggest the kind of thing I mean.3 And
2. Cindy Nemser, "My Memories of Eva Hesse," Feminist ArtJournal vol. 2, no. 1 (Winter 1973), p. 12.
3. Here, in the order listed in the text, are full citations for the articles mentioned: Paul Richard,
"Heartache Amid Abstraction," Washington Post, October 25, 1992; Hank Burchard, "Fragile Artist's
Agonized Life," Washington Post, October 23, 1992; Joyce Purnick, "A Portrait of the Artist: Tortured
and Talented," New York Post, December 13, 1972; Kay Larson, "The James Dean of Art," New York,
January 30, 1983, p. 50; Anna C. Chave, "Eva Hesse: A 'Girl Being a Sculpture,'" in Eva Hesse: A
Retrospective, pp. 99-117; Arthur C. Danto, "Growing Up Absurd," Art News, November 1989, pp.
118-121. The reviews of the 1992 exhibition form part of the Hesse file in the Library, National
Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.
Another Hesse 55
while some titles

"Cockroach or Q
self-indulgent m
immature, melan
Even when a wri
Arthur C. Danto
will. "Hesse appea
the tragedy rap:
fatal meaningless
art genuine. Why
tle eve die! We se
taste deserted hi
Joyce's injunction
Perhaps it would
ogy if its pace di
more precisely, i
firm root in recen
to the Yale catalo
requisite citation
It involves a doubl
the victim all her
who was a wom
female being. N
"tragedy" of the
banalities: I am th
"The most poigna
at thirty-four, a
years, produced o
sculpture."8
The most important decision for Hesse's reputation was taken soon after her
death by her older sister and executor, Helen Hesse Charash (b. 1933). She gave
two critics, Robert Pincus-Witten and Lucy R. Lippard, access to the notebooks
Hesse had kept from childhood and to the various other manuscripts among her
papers.9 The first gleanings by both writers were used in articles in print before the
4. Douglas Davis, "Cockroach or Queen," Newsweek, January 15, 1973. The phrase "cockroach or
queen" is here attributed to a friend of Hesse's (probably Cindy Nemser, who, however, was not Hesse's
friend); it is meant to convey Hesse's sensation of being both inferior and superior.
5. Danto, "Growing Up Absurd," p. 121.
6. Ibid., p. 118.
7. The essays in question are the one by Chave cited above (n. 3) and that by Maria Kreuzer, "The
Wound and the Self: Eva Hesse's Breakthrough in Germany," Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, pp. 75-84.
8. Barbara Rose, "A Special Woman, Her Surprise Art," Vogue, March 1973, p. 50.
9. According to a note in the files of the Fischbach Gallery, Hesse's dealer at the time, Charash was
equally prompt in blocking more sensationalist interest in her sister's life and death: she specifically
56 OCTOBER
end of 1971, an
a revised and
(the first eff
also transcribe
texts in which
the beginning
Both at the ti
the critic for
readers had b
Pincus-Witten
the lady, wond
Lippard, for
the artist and
in 1993. In th
come uncomf
feared that L
since 1963, th
come close en
Hesse myth w
odd absence o
Kramer, unco
despite discus
thinking that
ventures into
worries take
tributed more
was: the book
safely publish
on which it w
papers were m
definitively en
forbade any rele

Fischbach Gallery
of Hesse's illness
10. Robert Pincu
11. John Perreau
12. Interview w
American Art, Ja
13. Hilton Kramer
14. Details on th
Lippard papers, o
15. An inventory
Publishers, Inc.,
Another Hesse 57
What became ava

tual underpinning
as wound. Indeed,
doxically to anoth
Rosalind Krauss ha
a withdrawal int
beyond, or beneath
necessary to the f
that is the transcr
before Hesse died.
included in Art Ta
had appeared in A
print), and thus at
commentary on h
principle for whic
tion: the artist se
utter connectedne
which follows on
reaction to Carl A
metal plates were
Carl knew your re
I don't know! Ma
a thing about his
art is a total th
essence, a soul, a
life are inseparab
basically intuitiv
follow it throu
approach-than gi
want to call it....
and an unknown
with me and lif
form. I don't beli
counteract every
things-to find so
my thoughts. Th
was connected w
16. Rosalind Krauss, E

unpag.
17. Cindy Nemser, "An Interview with Eva Hesse," Artforum (May 1970), pp. 59-63.
58 OCTOBER
One of my
didn't have t
live without
Here and at
wants to be l
set out the f
are likewise
the justifica
necessary, it
her case from
script." As a
version of th
reorders ph
account is t
been separat
responses to
history that
more compl
qualification
that is offer
and an unk
Robert Raus
the gap betw
notion of an
seems less a
Note too that
Talk, the qu
would expect
his art, nam
unprompted
wants to set
smacks of "r
lines" do-"th
tion."21 The
referentiality
18. Ibid., p. 59.

19. Lippard, p. 5.
20. Hesse's admiration for Oldenburg is stated in the course of the Nemser interview; the citation,
from Oldenburg's manifesto "I am for an art..." [1961, 1967] is taken from B. Rose, Claes Oldenburg
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), p. 190. The definitive text was first published in Store Days
(New York: Something Else Press, 1967).
21. Nemser, Art Talk, pp. 223-24. It should be noted that the conditions under which Nemser
--- E-Ua f
I.__ __
11I
r"4A4
Project for an Installat

Museum. 1969.
Now a slight change of direction: among Hesse's papers is a drawing that,

though undated, was probably done in 1969. On it are a rough spatial plotting
and the words "build wall," "Whitney," "Process ... means as end (title)" and
"catalogue. film process"-cryptic notations, certainly, but enough to suggest that
the sheet stems from a stage in her preparations for the Whitney's 1969 exhibition
Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, to which she sent two works (in the end she did
not use the ideas she was turning over here). The drawing crops up in the context
of this essay, however, because of the reminder Hesse scrawled along its lower
edge: "my responsibility to know as I am being categorized in a way that's detri-
mental to my work." Appearances to the contrary, I am not proposing in this essay
to exercise responsibility on Hesse's behalf, but rather on my own account. I am
mistrustful of the assumptions and reductions at the heart of Hesse's reputation,
and fearful that they may indeed be detrimental, if not to her work (it seems able
to take care of itself, in every sense but the physical), then to our understanding
of it. Equally at issue is the continuing argument concerning what it means to
be female and to make art. This is an argument that migrates from artist to artist,
and will continue to do so until women's achievements are no longer seen as
conducted and published her interview with Hesse have complicated its status as a text. The first publi-
cation in Artforum reduces to a twelve-page manuscript a transcript which is almost 100 pages long; the
principles by which Hesse's speeches were assembled radically reconfigured the interview as a whole,
bringing together as single connected answers responses that were much more disjointed, and more-
over, uttered in quite different sessions of the interview. The text in Art Talk is more faithful to the orig-
inal transcript.
60 OCTOBER
"exceptional.
collapsing th
persuasivene
artist, and s
wise, we migh
left behind th
that case? H
produced a s
connections
organizer of
detailed chro
recollections
verbal pictur
"language alo
That self is t
of Hesse's id
Though a ne
exclusions co
In what foll
life is as muc
her interpre
would be bet
kinds of unde
be more usef
Hesse's art or
taken with th
at least for a
stances. To see them as profoundly social-as socially determined-is to
understand better how her art can be seen "as that of a woman."
These goals are best met, I think, not simply by cultivating a deep sense of
identification with the artist, but by trying to measure with some accuracy the
terms of her cultural and historical difference from ourselves. The wish to know
Hesse could conceivably be formed from other impulses than the desire to see
reflected in her one's own certainties concerning the female self. Anna C. Chave's
argument proposing Hesse's work as an articulation of "elements of that which
is so often denied or repressed about feminine experience: its repugnant and
piteous inheritance of pain" apparently occupies a different plane than does the
up-to-date assertion of one Washington reviewer that "Hesse's journal could be
22. Lippard, Hesse, p. 6.

23. Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, p. 18.
24. Ibid.
25. The argument to justify this assumption will be found in Three Artists (Th
Another Hesse 61
almost any career

strict definitions of the female condition: on the one hand woman is wounded, on
the other she struggles desperately to cope. These definitions have different
sources, of course-1980s "backlash" media fictions versus a current account in
the academic idea bank-but they are equally confident that their own immediate
social and intellectual contexts can supply a terminology able to describe Hesse
with perfect ease.
In what follows I aim to try to keep alive a sense of Hesse's distance from
ourselves. Yet I would nonetheless be the first to admit that I do so in order to find
the terms of her relation to the present; I am simply prepared to accept that these
meanings may lie in difference, not identity. Hesse-and above all, Hesse's art-
may be able to show us what we are not, remind us of things we have forgotten.
Attending to the terms and contexts of Hesse's life and art may be one way to
learn those lessons. In this essay I shall concentrate on the latter, leaving for
another occasion the examination of other factors and experiences constitutive of
her identity: her class and familial background; her education and marriage (to
the sculptor Tom Doyle); her journals, encounters with the psychoanalytic estab-
lishment of the 1950s and '60s, education, and the connection among the three;
and so on. I concentrate here instead on the vexed issue of the terms in which to
understand the connection between Hesse's art and life. My purpose in so doing
however, is parallel to that of Lippard, Chave, and the others who have written on
her work: I, too, want to find a way to explain my sense of Hesse's stature as an
artist, and the worth and interest of her art.
The Wound and the Window
What does Hesse's art look like? The question seems simple-it sits docilely
enough on the page-but answers to it obey more complex laws than might be
assumed. Disagreement begins with description, yet criticism cannot do without
the effort to characterize. Does Contingent (1968-69) look like "a ghastly array of
giant soiled bandages, or worse yet, like so many flayed, human skins (distantly
evocative of the Nazis' notorious use of human flesh to make lampshades) "?27 Or
is the following passage a better description of the piece: "at once more detached
and less associatable than most of Hesse's work, [Contingent] transcend[s] the
whimsical to make a statement that is grand simply in its existence, and at the
same time, is as profoundly personal or intimate as a work of art can be. It
incorporates the qualities and texture of the new and the old, of the battered and
the beautiful. With the opaque weight concentrated in the middle of the piece, it
seems from some angles to hover in midair, or to disintegrate at both ends."28
26. Chave, "A Girl Being a Sculpture," p. 113; Burchard, "Fragile Artist's Agonized Life."
27. Chave, "A Girl Being a Sculpture," p. 101.
62 OCTOBER
Conti
My question
summon, in d
described. A w
tions is for an
is no body in
abject remain
pleasure and i
to conjure op
Chave interes
ing through a
pain"--so as to
With one im
to her in the
put forth the
gural solo scu
art," Lippard
physical and
precision/ch
surface/indu
contrast, are
of her life an
29. Fischbach Ga
Another Hesse 63
our lasting intere

gifted young wom
disease-disease th
art."30 "We cannot
"An author may, ta
but he ought not,
deserves encourag
descriptions make
declarations: "Evoc
gestions not only
female anatomy-th
accidents, or acts
hose, bandages, res
scattered, slit, cyl
glass create an e
genitalia"; or, "W
inscribed in her ar
socio-political, sexu
The main issue is
is the case: I do no
misery."33 The ton
tive. It is offered,
of sculpture. The
such descriptions
the arguments of
the ways in whic
confirm, rather t
the female condit
What Chave fails
is some conceptio
utterances whose p
stand.
Which histories? One relevant category might be the reception of Hesse's art
during her lifetime, not because it is to be expected that contemporary critics "get
it right" (no more is it necessarily to be assumed they "get it wrong"), but for the
simple reason that the difference between what they wrote and what is or might be
written nowadays may well be instructive. Surely the most volatile issue for Chave
concerns the terms in which the body might be said to be present in Hesse's art. It
30. Chave, "A Girl Being a Sculpture," p. 103.

31. H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), we, q.v.
32. Chave, "A Girl Being a Sculpture," pp. 103, 101, 109.
33. Ibid., p. 102.
Long Life. 1965.
was also demonstrably present back in 1966, when she first exhibited sculpture in
New York, at two historic shows, the Graham Gallery's "Abstract Inflationism and
Stuffed Expressionism" and Fischbach Gallery's "Eccentric Abstraction" (Hang Up,
Ishtar, and Long Life were in the first; Several, Ingeminate, and Metronomic Irregularity
II were in the second). Here are the terms in which Hesse's sculpted body was
ushered into print. I cite first Lucy Lippard: "Hesse's self-contained but tentative
quality re-occurs in Long Life, a black wrapped sphere set in the floor and attached
to the wall by a graded 'lifeline.' It takes little imagination to perceive the body
'ego' that went into this work, but it adds the curiously withdrawn objectified sub-
jectivity of 'Swenson's new sexuality,' in which matter-of-fact understatement of
ideas usually overstated is paramount."34 These are observations that may take
some unpacking, though Lippard's references are not, as it turns out, all that
obscure. Nor were they meant to be: she was making use of some recent reading,
first of all, aJanuary 1966 essay by a Yale psychologist, GilbertJ. Rose, in which the
notion of body ego is advanced. Lippard defines his concept as naming the idea
that "symbolic thinking has a bridging function. Every symbol refers simultane-
ously to the body and the outside."35 Such an assumption was one guarantee of
a bodily reading of this art. "Swenson's new sexuality" for its part signals the idea
of sexuality in art advanced by G. R. Swenson in the catalogue of a show held,
34. Lippard, "New York Letter," Art International 10 (May 1966), p. 64.
35. Gilbert J. Rose, "The Springs of Art-A Psychoanalyst's Approach," Canadian Art 100 (January
1966), p. 27; Rose is here paraphrasing L. Kubie's article "The Distortion of the Symbolic Process in
Neurosis and Psychosis" [1953].
Another Hesse 65
once again, early

Contemporary A
Other Tradition,"
propose an altern
Freudian; it is ex
it has nothing to
Swenson, a symp
realm of sexual awareness."36
A bit later in 1966, Mel Bochner reviewed the "Eccentric Abstraction" show
for Arts. He had this to say about the appearance of the body in Hesse's art-
though he said it, let it be noted, only after he had relished the absolute
disembodiment of the mind-boggling totality that is Metronomic Irregularity II: "not
chaos but a structured order in itself yet unavailable to comprehension. .... It is a
fabrication of entanglement, a logical fiction. Regular, remote, and lifeless." Now
the body: "Her other pieces-atrophied organs and private parts-are not garish
or horrifying. The lacerated shiny surfaces have a detached presence which is real.
Hesse's work has an awkwardness similar to that of reality which is equally empty
of inherent meaning or simplistic contrasts. Her work and sensibility is [sic] in
advance of the various categories it has been placed in."37
Sometimes criticism is discounted because it is written by the artist's friends,
but in this case, the close relations between artist and critics are all the more
reason to take it seriously. Bochner and Lippard then occupied-and still occupy
-rather different positions as viewers of art, but they nonetheless agreed in 1966
on how to describe the ways the body is summoned by Hesse's art: it seems likely
that the artist herself would have concurred. (We know that she was energized and
gratified by critical interest in her work, and named Swenson as well as Bochner
and Lippard among those whose opinions she most valued.) These writers breathe
no suspicion of disease, suggest no ghoulishness, hint at no scenarios of dismem-
berment. Nor do they deny these scenarios-or urge their own-with such
vehemence as to make us suspect that a cover-up is afoot. They seem convinced-
and want to convince the reader-that what is compelling about this art is the
sheer mundanity of its symbols, its matter-of-fact way of being personal about the
body: no exaggeration, just understatement; no meanings outside substance, no
horror other than that of the real. In other words, those features of Hesse's art that
Chave takes as determinant of its meaning were more or less invisible thirty years
ago.
At this juncture Chave might perhaps wish to respond with the claim that
her main subject-not Hesse, but her own radical pessimism about the current
status of women-could not be broached by historical means: these are subjects
36. G. R. Swenson, The Other Tradition (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of
Pennsylvania, 1966), p. 35.
37. Mel Bochner, "Eccentric Abstraction," Arts 41 (1966), p. 58.
66 OCTOBER
about which
have nothing
the first att
later respons
objections. T
rant suggest
time when it
have her way
body as real
without that
be savored an
seems so far a
Hesse, I am
are women: a
means of rep
am speaking
materials of
subjectivism r
truth-telling
O'Keeffe, ho
of which she
more ambig
and tragedy.
existed, men
objective (th
of being amu
interesting
and disturbi
pletely abstra
By these lig
opposite. I c
Theodor W. A
a radio talk
later that ye
"Anyone wh
have to spea
German trad
his poetry,
allowed its t
38. John Perreau

39. Theodor W.
Columbia Univer
Another Hesse 67
commodity charac
failure ofJewish em
they are "the oppo
one who is not act
language were real
and words that are
disintegrate. But f
language itself is ali
Anyone who wan
will likewise hav
characteristic of h
what is striking a
Heine. Instead ther
imagery and effec
unchanged. On the
and Minimalism; s
immediately. The
These are Hesse's
words that come t
consequence of dis
against which a do
of any of these ter
Accession, say, even
in which her work
more and other to
account for, alone
with an immedia
explained by a mer
The physical histo
those desires: when
to be remade; to th
parents and museu
her head inside and
rior. As if in answ
the interior soon
real of the Minim
Whether in the w
drawing of the ins
40. Ibid., pp. 82-83.

41. Krauss, Eva Hesse. N
ing a discourse, argues
with contemporary prac
Accession II. 1967.
Detail of interior ofAccession II. 1967.
View of the Hesse exhibition, Fischbach

Gallery. 1968.
Another Hesse 69
linearity, as if to
control.
Looking at Hesse's work, I am claiming, involves recognizing in its opera-

tions a process akin to what Adorno describes as characteristic of the language
of the native poet. She allows the dialectic between her own forms and forms that
are pregiven to take place, and a smooth artistic structure thus disintegrates.
These phrases are a way of pointing to Hesse's confident use of structuring con-
ventions and forms, but of never allowing an experience of her work to be
reducible to mere system. Yet, conversely, a structuring system is never absent,
even when, as in Untitled ("Rope Piece"), it becomes nearly vestigial, reduced to the
finite set of hooks from which the piece is suspended. (Some of that tenuous
effect is captured by the attenuated grammar of Hesse's description of the piece:
"With its own rationale even it looks chaotic.")42 These are the conditions that
work to make possible a symbolic reading of Hesse's art, but that are also meant to
contain, even to chasten such readings, before they get out of hand. Hesse did not
intend her art to be reducible to her body alone-nor would it have been, I wager,
had death not intervened.
Perhaps the measure of the complexity of her intentions is given by the title
used for her first sculpture show in 1968. It was called "Chain Polymers"-not
"modular mess" or "messy neatness" or "pathetic objects" or "object objects" or
"anxious objects," or any of the other phrases the critics tried out in their review
(no, not "abject objects" either). If the name she used does not make you get up
and dance, the reason for its use may justify that failure. It is a phrase that signa
its allegiance to certain artistic concerns of 1968: to process, to "natural law," and
to organic system. Remember the copy of the periodic table on display in Hesse's
living room, the gift of Carl Andre; remember her friendship with Robert
Smithson, with whom she exchanged works in 1967. But yet the chosen phrase
is not a Smithsonian "crystalline structures" or "ordered elements." "Chain
Polymers" signals to the initiate the notion of a compound made up of element
that do indeed occur in a highly ordered fashion-the component elements have
the same proportions, and proportionately the same molecular weights-but out
of such structures of identity comes difference: the compound that results has
entirely different physical properties than do the structuring elements. The term
of course, is a metaphor for the workings of Hesse's art: it is a way to name a whole
that is conceptually incommensurate with the physical reality of its parts, even
while it adheres to their ordering principles.
From this interpretation the reader may well infer-rightly-my sympathy
with the main force of Lippard's approach to Hesse's art: her effort to keep
interpretation alive to the ways opposites join forces in a disquieting and unstabl
union. I do not think that this occurs, however, because Hesse's "art and life are
42. Barrette gives a good account of the interdependency of notions of order and chaos in this work
in Eva Hesse: Sculpture, p. 234.
70 OCTOBER
one." On the c
understanding
those issues over in her own terms. These are matters to which I take Hesse's
journal to be largely irrelevant, or at best, tangential. Hesse sometimes wrot
interestingly; she almost always wrote with feeling and with purpose: but her best
ideas are in her art. It leaves her words far behind.
If Hesse's life did enter her art, it did so by a process that I do not think
Hesse herself was in a position to describe, however hard she struggled to put
names to her motivations and her fears. In this sense too she conforms to
Swenson's definition of the post-Freudian self: by these lights, remember,
be seen as one of those many late-century people who are "more likely to
why they are doing something than what they are doing." If we were to
what Hesse did not know that she was doing in her art, we would be atten
the ways it was marked by her unconscious-marked in something like a s
Freudian sense. We would be looking for the ways it repeatedly conf
around the edges of a legibly artistic protocol, an imagery that was the re
of desires, prohibitions, and fears. I think such an imagery exists in Hess
and I take it to concern the artist's feelings toward her mother above all.
I am not speaking here of Hesse's sustained efforts to make a con
settlement with her mother's illness and suicide, even though it is impor
remember that those efforts were intense, and engaged her in defending
against the threat that identification with her mother (identification with he
woman) presented. Her journals served, not surprisingly, as the registry
process, which was (again not surprisingly) at its height during the year
marriage and in its immediate wake. They are peppered with remarks s
these: "I do now think that I am just like my mother was and have the
sickness and will die as she did. I always felt this" (Spring 1966). "My fat
mother got divorced, she was sick. he let her go off by herself-withou
children-she killed herself" (March 6, 1966). Or, "Shame of height is sha
incest-an obvious seen shame covering for a hidden shame. Tom's de
was planned as thought [sic] father's desertion of mother for me. I [sic] sh
this must therefore repeat and lose. punished for being bad. therefore my
bad, "'Eva is bad again' = Eva is sick again. I was sick and bad and theref
father. helen smart and good, not sick, lost. so if sick and helpless have father
which I then must punish myself" (Fall 1966). These notes have such a d
nected character-they differ in that regard from other writing in the jo
because they were made in the immediate aftermath of a psychiatric sessi
convey what Hesse was able to understand about her fears concerni
mother-fears that centered on the multiple risks she ran of reenact
mother's death as the inevitable result of her relationships with her husb
her father. The fear of incest could involve not just a fear of the daughte
caused her mother's suicide by seducing the father; if she takes her mothe
with her father, she may thus confirm her destiny as the heir of her m
Another Hesse 71
sickness, as well as o
marriage was to a
inevitable, fearful r
In the same conte
and Chave have not
Yet neither author r
tioned to express
child, with the clo
said, she was happy
might be possible t
child and the traum
relive it" (January
Diaspora, as Chave
wake, as the famil
up a second chanc
whole. Its complem
forever a girl, then
intimate figure o
moreover, are the
inflicted pain as w
that ambivalence-i
not reject me. she
own behavior when
But these are Hesse's conscious thoughts. To approach unconscious
motivation we will have to take a different tack. Among Hesse's drawings there
occurs a motif that was varied and repeated often enough to have earned both a
name and status as a separate category within her graphic work. Ellen Johnson,
author of the only study of the drawings, called it the "window motif." No more
complicated terminology was needed because the appearance in Hesse's art of
framed fields, sometimes regularly divided into compartments with "panes" and
mullions and moldings drawn in, is self-evident. According to Johnson, the artist
herself called these images windows. While Johnson grants their roots in her draw-
ings of 1960-61, she argues that their return to Hesse's art in 1968 may have had
more immediate causes: "it is not impossible that the image ... was suggested by
her own windows that looked across the Bowery to Tom Doyle's studio."45 Those
windows had only four panes, Johnson concedes, but if one counts in the bars of
the fire escape beyond, then a real "source" can be found for the drawings'
effects. Lippard's interpretation is as holistic as Johnson's is literal. Borrowing
43. Chave, "A Girl Being a Sculpture," p. 105; Lippard, Hesse, p. 23.
44. My statement relies on an entry in Hesse's journal for October 19, 1964: "I am now 28, afraid to
say almost 29 and really fear never getting well. I seem to have felt like this since 8 years old."
45. Johnson, p. 22.
72 OCTOBER
Hilton Kramer
conceived," she
at the time th
My own view
materially "re
encompass mo
confined to d
in representa
jumping from
two concerns
characterizing
motif, she rin
sarily) their i
makes it seem
marks of a p
edge has the a
treatment of t
ings, it can b
presence is em
till it has a ba
varied: somet
shapes with ro
figures; there
the frame ho
these are effec
compartment
the compartm
later series, b
effects of lig
atmosphere su
completely.
The effects
frame, and th
it. They offer
are carried ov
notably picto
sculpture it s
tion. Hang U
window fram
metaphor of p
of the literal
46. Lippard, He
Hang Up. 1966.
emptiness means that the old pictorial protocols have been turned inside out.
The space which ought to be behind the frame is now before it, delimited by the
scooping arc of the wire jutting from it. The wire threatens to catch the viewer up
into its new, materialized pictorial space.
Hang Up is an object, I am arguing, that though singularly empty is packed
full of a special understanding of the space beyond the frame. Its form effectively
confuses the boundaries and status of the two, playing them off against each
other. That same equivocal position toward space and the viewer-what is inside,
outside, and beyond-is reiterated by many of Hesse's sculptures, and the viewer
is again and again reached out to by or refused access to the sculptural object.
Hesse specialized in objects using surfaces and voids and compartments and
ropes, and whatever their differences, they all are similar in the kinds of overtures
they make to the viewer. Those overtures involve solicitation and refusal-they
throw us a rope, sometimes literally, always figuratively, but we can never be sure if
we will be climbing in or out. Are we being offered an exit, or being forced into a
confrontation?
This discussion risks losing sight of the workings of Hesse's unconscious-a

notion that after all was its motivating impulse. But the artist and her unconscious
are not far away. I hope it is clear that, among other possibilities, "the viewer" i
the preceding paragraphs is Hesse herself. It is easy to slip back into a discussion
of the pictorial and the sculptural and their redefinition in Hesse's hands, and t
replace her with "the viewer," because those representational issues are part of he
conscious intention: such a discussion is necessitated by the sheer intellectual
74 OCTOBER
scope of her
constant term
underwritten
she herself w
simply made
Here, though,
the most im
idea of absur
that is why I
metal rod co
ten or eleven
this frame,
very very fin
from light t
lous structure
the kind of
or soul or abs
to get.47
To take Hesse's account of Hang Up as an adequate description of the work

(which I think it is) means reading the various kinds of claims it registers about
the piece. For a start, she suggests that in naming what it expresses we need not
choose among "depth or soul or absurdity or life or meaning or feeling or intellect,"
but instead can grant it a measure of all these. Ludicrousness and absurdity are
above all a matter of structure: here Hesse can only be referring to its sabotage of
the conventions of the representational categories as she encountered them.
Hang Up is something, yet it is also nothing, this despite the craft it took to make
it. Yet while intellect and depth, and even meaning, may well follow from these
important points, life and feeling must nonetheless be lodged elsewhere in the
work. I think they are to be found in the intensity of its play with the spectator's
responses-an intensity that likewise leaves its maker/spectator in two minds:
"It is extreme and that is why I like it and don't like it." Like and dislike are the
product, I wager, of the work's return to the scene of wish and prohibition.
Let me emphasize that in offering this line of argument I am not meaning to
advance a singular, exclusive interpretation of Hesse's art. Although the practices
of both drawing and sculpture may have been in some definitive sense the
products of unconscious processes-and as such among the means she used to
come to terms with the loss of her mother-their status as part of that process
does not in any sense provide a sufficient account of their appearance. Their
unconscious content was screened or propped behind "strictly artistic" concerns,
47. Quoted in ibid., p. 56.
Another Hesse 75
which in and of th
an adequate explan
explain it entirely.
One test of any in
phenomena it can
motif, as well as t
limited claims. It s
it claims that her animation of Minimalist forms with effects able to elicit desire
and fear might have arisen from a possible overlap between those forms an
personal fantasy. I am not arguing, however, that Hesse offers us her own fantasy as
the legible subject of her art. I think, rather, that she solicits responses that are
considerably more metaphoric in kind. The animism of her work-her use o
materials and shapes that might be said to grant her objects the status of substi-
tute bodies-always occurs within a formal context assertive enough to remove th
work (if it is considered seriously) from a purely personal range of meanings. Not
too that it is only from this perspective that we can see Hesse's project as proposing
a new subject for Minimalism: in retrospect that subject might be termed fantasy
though Hesse herself used a different term, one consistent with the conceptual
tenor of her moment. In 1968 she wrote,"I don't ask that Accession be participate
with other than in thought." To substitute "fantasy" within this formula is to recog-
nize that the viewer's "thought" will respond to those aspects of Hesse's art tha
most thoroughly revise the Minimalist protocol, as well as those which retain it. I
is to acknowledge too the emphasis she herself placed on such responses (rather
than her own).
The body in question is likewise not so importantly Hesse's as the viewer's, in
that it is the presence of the sculpture that summons from the latter such bodily
analogies as his or her personal experience will allow. And the body is also that of
the sculpture itself. Note, however, that though Hesse and the viewer were one
and the same while any work was being made (and her bodily experiences thus
implicated in the process of making), the recognition that Hesse was her own firs
viewer does not mean that she therefore imagined herself as the best or only one
She was inevitably aware that on completion art becomes subject to other proto
cols of viewing, the transition effected by the terms of its adherence to a set of
formal conventions. The various orders to which Hesse submitted her art-the
regularity of the grid, the rhythm of a sequence or series, the compulsive staccato
of repetition-are meant to open up the work to interpretations that are more
(and less) than purely personal. A sculpture that utilizes the Minimalist grammar,
however loosely or willfully, expects somehow to profit from that use. For Hesse,
the payoff comes in the way that system can be made to invoke the conditions
that are its conceptual opposites, without surrendering its claim to legibility or
relevance within the artistic orders of the day.
This means that when we speak of Hesse's sculpture, we are not licensed by it
to speak of frailty instead of strength, or chaos instead of order, or flesh instead of
76 OCTOBER
latex, or absen
chaos and ord
sarily experie
Hang Up can r
because to do s
to exemplify
a form that l
impossible to s
as evoking fir
does not thus
standing of t
language as pu
at the same t
language-like
same time as
is there some
somewhere ma
The Ca
Speaking of H
artist who had the most influence on Eva was Adolf Hitler."48 The statement was
uttered as he aired his objections to some of the current responses to Hesse: he
took issue particularly with the view that Joseph Beuys, whose work she had
encountered in Germany, had meant much for the ultimate direction of her work.
Beuys's art, according to Doyle, is "too Nazi" in tone, while Hesse's is anything but.
This opinion appears here, however, not because it makes particular artistic
sense-Doyle was not talking about style-but because it is so outrageous (as
Doyle well knew), and because out of that excessiveness can come some conclusions
about the purpose and meaning of Hesse's art.
Hesse and Hitler (should I say Eva and Adolf?): the linkage is outrageous for
many reasons, but mostly because of the sheer discrepancy in their historical
stature; by rights they cannot and should not be compared. The fact that the
comparison occurred to Doyle, however-an observer who knew Hesse well-
seems to offer a kind of emblem or tool to begin to understand the scale of
Hesse's ambitions as an artist. Already in 1959, just out of Yale, she was beginning
the process of making a name for herself: she set her sights on inclusion in the
MOMA exhibition "Sixteen Americans" and was deeply chagrined when (unlike
Jay De Feo) she was not selected. Her rejection has nothing to do with Hitler, of
course, but it does have something to say about the workings of Hesse's mind and
48. Tom Doyle in conversation with the author, August 12, 1993.
Another Hesse 77
ambition. By 1959
had no compuncti
ring, no self-abase
1960s-this was the
had turned to mak
She thought it was
counts. Nor did she
It is rare in the h
so confidently in
such assurance echoed in the terms in which her art was first received. That
confidence-we might call it entitlement-might have been "wrong," in the
that it cannot be said to follow logically from the social and economic posit
the majority of American women at this particular moment in history, or to ref
that position. The case of Hesse is a kind of exceptionalism that is to be acco
for by the precise terms of the intersection, in this instance, between person
historical circumstance. These are conditions that include the accidents of birth
and family history and their various consequences, the ideology of artistic se
hood current at the time, the urgencies and priorities of contemporary artis
practice, and so on. Their conjunction, in Hesse's case, enabled the staking out
a position that, "wrong" or not, was one of considerable strength.
Hesse's sense of entitlement, I have argued, concerned above all the
protocols of modernism-protocols manifest in a variety of ways. Consider th
assurance with which she was able to identify herself-or at least the artist she
at the outset of her career-as "an Abstract Expressionist." The label seemed to
her practice and her identity adequately enough to override the apparent gend
prescriptiveness of the role. And what about the artists to whom, at the end of
career, she claimed to feel the greatest affinity: Jackson Pollock, Claes Oldenbu
Bruce Nauman, Carl Andre, Andy Warhol, and Richard Serra? These were not
casual or shallow identifications, summoned for the sake of conversation when
interviewer came to call. Hesse, for example, visited Serra's 1969 Guggenheim
installation of lead props and jotted a series of sketches on an envelope, notes t
in rapid sequence capture the gist of his main sculptural ideas.49 (The drawing
one of only a few copies by Hesse of works of other artists to have survived
another transcribes a sheet by Leonardo da Vinci.) The sketches give fragmenta
evidence of a process demonstrated in extenso by her sculpture, namely, Hes
profound engagement with the main artistic ideas of the day. Her embrace of
49. For photographs of the Serra installation, see Rosalind Krauss, Richard Serra/Sculpture (N
York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986), figs. 23, 24. Serra exhibited Shovel Plate Prop, Clothes Pin Prop, W
Plate Prop, Right Angle Prop, Sign Board Prop, Floor Pole Prop, and Plate Roll Prop. In Hesse's drawing
order is: (recto) Right Angle Prop, Clothes Pin Prop, Plate Roll Prop, Floor Pole Prop, Sign Board Prop,
Shovel Plate Prop. On the verso are sketched two versions of One Ton Prop (House of Cards). The diff
ences between the order of the installation and of the sketches raise the possibility that Hesse m
have drawn these works from memory.
78 OCTOBER
P,?OST.AHris VOx ."
30335-789-1 042 2
EV HESSE DOYLE
134 BOWERY
NEW YORK N Y
/ : ::
.-i:- -:. :_i. i. - -i- _ .i i-..: ; 1
Sketches of sculptures in Richard Serra's

Guggenheim exhibition. 1969.
workings and reworkings of the modernism exemplified by these various artists

fueled the motor propelling her own work. I find no indication within it that these
relations were other than productive for its range and scope.
Her art relates to their practices-and differs from it-by virtue of its effort
to address and rectify modernism's apparent alienation from the real. Like
Pollock, Warhol, Serra, and the others, this problem was Hesse's point of depar-
ture. At issue in her art, as in theirs, is a conception of the aesthetic that defines
its concern as the field of intersection between the bodily and the ideal, the
empirical and the imaginary; her art likewise takes as its purpose the redefinition
of the terms of that interaction. Hesse's contribution to the modernism of her
moment was the insistence, communicated in her art, that the aesthetic need not
recreate the effect of bodily alienation that is the hallmark of modern life, but
rather should counter that alienation by its insistent summoning of the sensual
realm. Her work provides an experience of frailty within order, disorder within
unity; it urges no fictions of coherence, power, and completeness without broaching
their opposite as a matter of course. Nor do I think it offers any fictions of the
female. To claim that Hesse's work looks the way it does because she was female is
to claim very little: the statement is true because she was not male-this is histori-
cal fact-and not because the work can thus be said to be offering a version of
"the female experience." To think of the subject of Hesse's work as being, in some
profound sense, "human" experience, rather than specifically female experience,
is to make better sense of her ambitions as a modernist, and as a historical
subject working within the wake of holocaust. It is likewise to resist reinscribing
Another Hesse 79
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both Hesse
nism's mai
Such a ref
and to adm
both heir
Sometimes
the female,
at particul
are sometim
to describe
from her a
(like "hor
inevitable.
some cases
process of
make use o
become th
having a k
rather than
protuberan
any direct
stands, and
tance to gr
80 OCTOBER
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Studies for Contingent. 1969.
than sculpture. Nor is Contingent the phallus. Hence Hesse

Nemser in 1970, on the question of whether she thought of
"I don't see that at all. I'm not saying female/male when I
though I recognize that is going to be said, I cancel that."50
"Can cel: 1. to make void; revoke; annul: to cancel a reser
or perforate (a postage stamp, admission ticket, etc.) to rend
3. to neutralize, counterbalance; compensate for: His sincer
sarcastic remark." It is impossible to cancel difference-He
economy of gender was reserved for her from birth-yet that
from imagining another possibility-one that might c
male/female polarity, even try "to render it invalid for reu
art that comes to define its purpose as the incorporation
difference just so as to neutralize that term. To "incorpor
Hesse's lights, is to produce a sculpture invariably made up
are distinct; they signify as separate pieces; their presence
work as a whole. I am thinking, for example, of the gridde
Schema (1967) or the dented buckets of Repetition Nineteen. Ye
of her concerns in the former work "as involving what is c
of a class" is a clue to the fate of difference in these contexts.5
the variations among buckets or hemispheres or any of the

51. Barrette, Eva Hesse: Sculpture, p. 156.
Another Hesse 81
Schema. 1967.
Repetition Nineteen III. 1968.
Sequel. 1967.
the various pieces are there for scrutiny and description. But the most meaningful
thing we can say of this or that buckle or dimple is that it exists "because she
did it that way"-not a trivial verdict, of course, since the necessary distinction
of Hesse's art from Minimalist practice is thus secured-and thus opened to
gendered interpretation.52 But these corporal differences are nonetheless never
meaningful in and of themselves; instead individual variation is made meaningless
by the place each element is assigned as a subordinate within a whole.
Hesse's concern to cancel difference has a range of other manifestations;
indeed, some of them emerge in further work linked to Schema and Repetition
Nineteen. Schema, for example, has a sequel called (what else?) Sequel (1968) which
both maintains and reverses the concerns of the earlier piece. Order cedes to
disorder, parts (the hemispheres) yield to wholes (though an opening maintained
in each sphere makes it evident they are less than complete). Schema is certainly
different from Sequel-but that difference is only ever intelligible through their
linkage, as a result of their mutual dependency and interreliance. And a similar
point can be made via one of the offshoots of Repetition Nineteen: it is not another
work of art, in this instance, but a series of photographs in which Hesse recorded
four different arrangements of an early version of the piece. The snapshots
document one key aspect of the work-that no one arrangement is definitive-
52. This possibility becomes more and more part of the illusion of her art, since as her career
advanced she began to rely on fabricators and to employ assistants in the execution of her art. I am
grateful to Blake Simpson for his suggestion of this point.
Hesse [?]. Four photographs of various
arrangements of the plaster version of
Repetition Nineteen. 1968.
but they also declare that differences of placement, though determinant of the
work's fundamental character, cannot therefore erode or destabilize its overall
import.
This attitude toward difference has still other consequences. When asked by
Nemser to describe her "opinion of the position of women artists in the art world"
(the context was the letter to the artist setting up the 1970 interview), Hesse
scrawled an immediate, declarative reaction on the bottom of the page: "The way
to beat discrimination in art is by art. Excellence has no sex." She was speaking in
shorthand: when the statement is unpacked, she seems to saying something like,
"the woman who wants to beat discrimination in art must make work so good that
it can elude its critics. The standard of excellence in art is universal, thus outside
gender." I think that these phrases are an adequate rendering of Hesse's beliefs
about art: I have tried, here and in the longer study of which this essay forms a
part, to point to their origins, and to demonstrate the ways in which these beliefs
are profoundly ideological, rather than simply rule them out of court. Accordingly
my stress has fallen on the ways this ideology proved itself enabling to Hesse's art.
Bound up within it, moreover, is a variety of materials directly useful to under-
standing it. Excellence, as summoned in this statement, is clearly meant as a
property both of maker and objects; it has implications for viewers as well. An
excellent artist makes excellent works that are outside gender, and which, still
paraphrasing Hesse, aim to "cancel female/male." Such a cancellation does not
propose androgyny as some kind of sexless third term, or intend a version of
sexual ambiguity, as might be the case in other instances. Instead it envisions
84 OCTOBER
viewers (view
or female, e
Like Hesse's
to differenc
Here is an im
cultural rem
art become m
of cultural a
so prosaic and
To claim th
human quali
force or pur
account that
neglect to re
born in Ham
its criticism
Yet like "ma
stance that n
is Hesse's art.

Another Hesse - Anne M Wagner

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Another Hesse - Anne M Wagner

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Three "Portraits" of Eva Hesse

Mel Bochner, Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966:

Hesse in Kettwig-am-Ruhr, 1965:

A photograph of the table in Hesse's studio, 1968:

OCTOBER 69, Summer 1994, pp. 49-84. ? 1994 Anne M. Wagner.

Eva Hesse at the opening of her exhibi-

H. Landshoff [?]. The table in Hesse's

Hesse was no long

while some titles

forbade any rele

What became ava

16. Rosalind Krauss, E

18. Ibid., p. 59.

Project for an Installat

Now a slight change of direction: among Hesse's papers is a drawing that,

22. Lippard, Hesse, p. 6.

almost any career

The Wound and the Window

our lasting intere

30. Chave, "A Girl Being a Sculpture," p. 103.

once again, early

38. John Perreau

40. Ibid., pp. 82-83.

Detail of interior ofAccession II. 1967.

View of the Hesse exhibition, Fischbach

Looking at Hesse's work, I am claiming, involves recognizing in its opera-

This discussion risks losing sight of the workings of Hesse's unconscious-a

To take Hesse's account of Hang Up as an adequate description of the work

47. Quoted in ibid., p. 56.

P,?OST.AHris VOx ."

Sketches of sculptures in Richard Serra's

workings and reworkings of the modernism exemplified by these various artists

iiiiiiiiililiiiiiiiiiiii':ii;itiiiiiiriiiiiiiiiiiiii :s-:i~c:::iii-:::::::i:::-:iiiiiiiii ?iiiiiiii !i_!iiiii-if .: ::.. _:i

:'::-':::': -:_:: .:.. _:i c:-ii ii i iii :,iii .,iiiiiiiiii --i-::

Studies for Contingent. 1969.

than sculpture. Nor is Contingent the phallus. Hence Hesse

50. Lippard, Hesse, p. 206.

Repetition Nineteen III. 1968.

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